When The Oxford Book of English Verse by A. T. Quiller-Couch appeared in 1900, Punch recommended it as “a most useful book for those who, being not 'unaccustomed to public speaking' and loving to embellish their flow of language with quotations from poets whose works they have never read ... are only too grateful to any well-read collector placing so excellent a store as this at their service,” and predicted that because those who owned his anthology would be spared the tedious necessity of actually reading poetry, “many an after-dinner and learned society speaker will bless the name of this “Q. C."' Behind its deadpan humor, this statement tells us quite a bit about taste and the anthologist's relation to it in the world into which the Oxford Book was born: if the joke depends on the reality that few people read poetry, it equally depends on the pretense that everybody is supposed to, and it also implies a canon of poetry which one ought to read. Such had certainly been the case in the day of Q's mentor Francis Palgrave, who said in his preface to The Golden Treasury, the progenitor of Q’s Oxford book, that he “will regard as his fittest readers those who love poetry so well that he can offer them nothing not already known and valued,” which assumes there exists a body of verse valued by social consensus. FOR this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.

I've been an Anglophile for nearly as long as I can remember and England has always been the one place I most wanted to visit. Finally, in 2017, my 51st year of life, my husband and I were able to spend 2 glorious weeks road-tripping across England, from the Lake District to York to Derbyshire to the Cotswold region to the South West coast and finally to London. We stayed in Richmond for the final 3 days of our trip in a charming Airbnb cottage very near Kew Gardens and Kew Station. We spent our last day at Kew Gardens - the weather was uncommonly hot, the hottest week of the entire summer, as it turns out, and its refreshingly green spaces were the most pleasant surroundings possible in the 32C heat.

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Q's own characterization of his job as “to bring home and render so great a spoil [of poetry] compendiously ... as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated,” places him squarely in his mentor's tradition as summarizer and transmitter of the nation's poetic taste. If Q then was following taste, where did it lead him? Did he produce an anthology giving us a unified array of poems which are, in those words of Shelley which Palgrave had quoted as The Golden Treasury's program, “episodes to that great Poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world”? Does his book embody that one great poem? And if so, what does it tell us about that one great mind? Sir Henry Newbolt (from Poems New and Old): Sir Francis Newbolt and the executors of the late Sir Henry Newbolt. Anthologies are the route by which young people find poets, and this one is full of good introductions to good poets.”–Helen Vendler, The New Republic James Joyce (from Collected Poems): Mr. Joyce; Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd.; The Viking Press, New York.

Edward Thomas (from Collected Poems of Edward Thomas) . Mrs. Edward Thomas and Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd. Generous and wide-ranging, mixing familiar with fresh delights, this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse. George Meredith -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- Christina G. Rossetti -- Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] -- Richard Watson Dixon -- William Morris -- James Thomson -- Algernon Charles Swinburne -- Cosmo Monkhouse -- Thomas Hardy -- Gerard M. Hopkins -- Robert Bridges -- William Ernest Henley -- Robert Louis Stevenson -- Oscar Wilde -- John Davidson -- Dollie Radford -- A.E. Housman -- W.B. Yeats -- Rudyard Kipling -- Ernest Dowson -- Charlotte Mew -- Hilaire Belloc -- J.M. Synge -- Walter de la Mare -- E.C. Bentley -- Edward Thomas -- John Masefield -- James Stephens -- D.H. Lawrence -- Humbert Wolfe -- Frances Cornford -- Siegfried Sassoon -- Edwin Muir -- Rupert Brooke -- Elizabeth Daryush -- R.A. Knox -- T.S. Eliot -- Arthur Waley -- Ivor Gurney -- Isaac Rosenberg -- Hugh MacDiarmid [Christopher Murray Grieve] -- Wilfred Owen -- Robert Graves -- Austin Clarke -- Edmund Blunden -- Basil Bunting A. E. Housman (from Last Poems and A Shropshire Lad): the literary executors, Messrs. Henry Holt, Inc., New York.

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Mary Coleridge (from Poems): Sir Francis Newbolt and the executors of the late Sir Henry Newbolt; Messrs. Elkin Mathews.

R. L. Stevenson: the executors; Messrs. Chatto & Windus, Ltd.; Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. To the President and Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College Oxford / a house of learning; ancient, liberal, humane, and my most kindly nurse" T. E. Brown (from Collected Poems of T. E. Brown): the author's representatives; Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; The Macmillan Co., New York.Edward Taylor -- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough -- Anne Finch -- Countess of Winchilsea -- Tom Brown -- Matthew Prior -- George Granville, Lord Lansdowne -- Jonathan Swift -- William Congreve -- Joseph Addison -- Isaac Watts -- Joseph Trapp -- George Berkeley -- John Gay -- Allan Ramsay -- Alexander Pope -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -- Charles Mordaunt, William Oldys -- Samuel Johnson -- William Shenstone -- Thomas Gray -- William Collins -- Mary Leapor -- Christopher Smart -- Frances Greville -- Jean Elliot -- Oliver Goldsmith -- William Cowper -- Anna Seward -- Robert Fergusson -- Lade Anne Lindsay -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I think Q was brilliant to end on this poem which exactly defines my feelings on reading this volume.BY favour of the Public, The Oxford Book of English Verse has held its own in request for close upon forty years. The editor would stand convicted of dullness indeed if in these years he had not learnt, revising his judgement, to regret some inclusions and omissions; of indolence, moreover, the industry of scholars having rescued to light meanwhile many gems long hidden away in libraries, miscellanies, even scrap-books. In this new edition, therefore, I have risked repairing the old structure with a stone here, a tile there, and hope to have left it as weather-proof as when it as first built.